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Review: ‘The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers,’ by Maxwell King

Regan McMahonOctober 22, 2018Updated: October 23, 2018, 5:08 pm

“The Good Neighbor” Photo: Abrams

On his long-running television show, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Fred Rogers exuded avuncular familiarity, wearing his casual cardigan and sneakers and speaking directly into the camera to preschool children in his gentle, measured cadence. But to adults, he could be utterly disarming, as readers learn in Maxwell King’s meaty biography, “The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers.”

When Rogers testifies at a 1969 Senate subcommittee hearing advocating for a $20 million bill to fund national public television, he abandons his prepared statement and warmly explains to the gruff committee chair, Sen. John Pastore, what he does on his program: “I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. … And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.” He ends by reciting the lyrics to one his songs, beginning with the question “What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

After he’s done, Pastore tells him, “Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.”

Footage of their exchange appears in the affecting documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” which has grossed more than $22 million since its release in June. Clearly a lot of people are curious to know the “real” Fred Rogers, who died of stomach cancer in 2003, a month before he would have turned 75.

According to the many friends, family members (his sister, wife, and two sons), co-workers, cast members, academics and clergy King interviewed, Rogers was his authentic self onscreen and off. Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis recalls that after his appearance on the “Neighborhood,” where he saw “the respect in how he treated people … and the type of love people had for him … That’s the thing that stuck with me the most of everything. …this is really how he is.”

First lady Hillary Clinton and Fred Rogers at a discussion on children’s programming in Washington, D.C., in 1996. Photo: David Hume Kennerly, Getty Images

Guided by his Christian values (he was an ordained Presbyterian minister who read the Bible every morning) and the progressive child development research of Margaret McFarland, whom he regularly consulted on scripts, Rogers was kind and empathetic, though he could also be stubborn and self-absorbed. Music was his passion; he wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, and played piano and sang on his show. And he had an impish sense of humor.

Actor Michael Keaton, who was a stagehand for the “Neighborhood,” once placed an inflatable sex doll in Mister Rogers’ on-set closet during a taping as a prank. Rogers opened the door and without skipping a beat, led the doll in a Fred Astaire-style dance before putting it back in the closet and reshooting.

King, a former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was executive director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media from 2008 to 2010 and is now CEO of the Pittsburgh Foundation. His writing is workmanlike and at times repetitive, but he corrals telling anecdotes, includes two eight-page photo signatures, and makes insightful connections between Rogers’ childhood issues and his life’s work.

The son of a wealthy industrialist father and philanthropist mother in Latrobe, Penn., 40 miles from Pittsburgh, Rogers was once chased home by grade school classmates yelling “fat Freddy.” (As an adult he kept his weight at a consistent 143 pounds, thanks to a teetotaling, vegetarian diet and daily swim.) After that, his loving but overprotective parents had their chauffeur drive him to and from school. King maintains that the bullying and loneliness Rogers experienced underpinned his sensitivity to kids’ feelings and his own self-doubt (he consulted a psychiatrist for most of his adult life).

Rogers’ TV show “flowed straight out of Rogers’ life: from his childhood, his family and the small town of Latrobe,” writes King. “It flowed out of the attic of his parents’ house on Weldon Street, where a small, shy elementary-school child amused a handful of playmates with his puppets; and from the streets of Latrobe, where young Fred Rogers listened for the clang of the trolley before crossing the street. … In the Neighborhood, he used his memories to create an idealized version of the town, where children could feel understood and valued.”

King traces Rogers’ career from post-college apprentice at NBC in 1951 through three incarnations of his kids’ show: “The Children’s Corner” (1954-61) on Pittsburgh’s WQED; the 15-minute daily “Misterogers” (1963-67) airing in Canada; and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” on the regional Eastern Educational Network 1966-67, then nationally on PBS from 1968 to 2001, with a 1975-1979 hiatus. He covers Rogers’ failures at adult programming, continued impact with shows like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” and lasting legacy.

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” brought “the importance of early childhood into the mainstream of popular culture,” King notes. “Fred Rogers’ instinct to use television, the most powerful popular culture tool of our time, to advance such a high-minded educational agenda was a stroke of pure genius.”

The Good Neighbor

The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

By Maxwell King

(Abrams; 416 pages; $28)

Regan McMahon

Regan McMahon
Regan McMahon is an Oakland writer and deputy editor for books for Common Sense Media. Email: books@sfchronicle.com